Outspoken actress and freedom fighter, Redgrave gave a sensational
performance as Rosalind in 'As You Like It' in 1961. She turned the
Academy Awards into a political outburst on 29 March 1978, and work offers dissipated soon after. Her daughter
is Natasha Richardson (b. 11 May 1963, 5.00 pm GDT, London, England,
51N30, 0W10, from her mother's autobiography, B). Redgrave had a long-term
relationship with actor Franco Nero (b. 23 November 1941, 10.30 pm CEDT
(-2), San Lazzaro, Parma, Italy, 44N48, 10E22, from Birth Record, Grazia
Bordoni, AA). She appeared in a 1991 remake of 'Whatever happened to
Baby Jane?' with her sister, actress Lynn Redgrave (b. 8 March 1943,
8.15 am GDT, London, England, 51N30, 0W10, from her to Tashi Grady,
A).

A
theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole
generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being
completely deprived.

Analyzing the problem
is vital. It's the only way you're going to arrive at the right thing
to do.
(Virgo Moon)

Anybody can lose
their job and have nothing. And people mind having nothing.

Ask the right questions
if you're to find the right answers.
(Mercury Jupiter conjunction)

How can we help
the people in the audience-and ourselves-remove the cobwebs that prevents
us all from being able to reach and touch things?

How could it not
be horrifying and disturbing to see people sleeping on the streets?

How do we rid ourselves
of tyranny? How do we rid ourselves of an oppressive society?

I began to see something
of what was going in terms of actually keeping up people's spirit to
resist-the resistance that causes change-even in the worst imaginable
circumstances.
(Uranus conjunct MC)

I do feel very inadequate
about it, but I feel I must try. I think any citizen can understand
that you must raise your voice and do the best you can to speak out.

I don't know of
a single government that actually abides by international human rights
law, not one, including my own. They violate these laws in the most
despicable and obscene way.

I don't want to
give my ego a chance.

I have a bit of
a tease and a laugh and try to make the person feel not put down. You
can still kiss people. A kiss is still a kiss.

I have to go into
Shakespeare's times and look at the times he was examining when he wrote
the play. He was fantastically aware of so much, because he was living
in such awful times.

I haven't had to
face something that truly terrified me for quite a long time. I have
continued to face quite a lot of situations that might frighten other
people, but they haven't frightened me.
(Leo Ascendant. Mars in Scorpio.)

I love life so much,
perhaps now more than ever before. But that doesn't mean that I can't
be platonic.

I really think certain
governments think that the poor are the undeserving poor-that they're
poor because they're evil, and that the poor shouldn't have knowledge!

I want to try to
reveal the tragedy I think Shakespeare is showing, which is that some
human beings act like barbarians. And yet they could be the opposite
of that-it's just a hand's length away.

I'm working on a
double helix, which is there but can't function without that which comes
in. In theater terms, that means, What do you do to open up the conditions
in which the whole thing becomes activated?

I've always tended
to be a sort of platonic person.
(Sun in Aquarius. Moon in Virgo.)

I've been to Sarajevo
a few times and have gotten to know a lot of people there who put on
plays during the siege. I wanted to share in that because I knew it
was important to them.

I've come to see
that people understand what I've tried to do, however inadequately I
do it.

I've known why I
was doing what I was doing. If you know why you must do something, that's
a very big strength.
(North Node in Sagittarius)

I've learned an
awful lot, which has been one of the good things about all the vicissitudes.

I've opened my mouth
on a lot of subjects. And I thought the more prestige you get, I'd have
the power to do what I like. It's not true.

I've seen a theater
that does have free tickets. It's in Sao Paulo, and it's funded by industry.
I saw one of the most brilliant productions I've ever seen there, and
the theater was packed.

I've talked with
people who've lived through times when everything had to be coded, like
Moscow until perestroika and glasnost. Those who knew those codes just
translated them in their heads.

If, as Actors or
writers or directors or designers, we can keep the will to resist alive
in as many people as possible, then that's what we are about, and that's
what we can do.

Theater and poetry
were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
(North Node in Sagittarius opposition Chiron in Gemini.)

Born
January 30, 1937 (age 70)
London, England, United Kingdom
Height 180 cm (5 ft 11 in)
Years active 1958 -
Spouse(s) Tony Richardson (1962-1967) Ancestry
and Familywas born in London, England to Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel
Kempson (Lady Redgrave). Her siblings, Lynn Redgrave and the equally
outspoken Corin Redgrave, are also acclaimed actors. Redgrave's daughters,
Natasha Richardson and Joely Richardson (by her 1962-1967 marriage to
film director Tony Richardson) have also built respected acting careers.
Redgrave's son Carlo Nero (né Carlo Sparanero), by her relationship
with Italian actor Franco Nero (né Francesco Sparanero), is a
writer and film director. She met Nero while filming Camelot in 1967.
During the late 1970s and 1980s she had a long-term relationship with
actor Timothy Dalton.

Stage careerentered the Central School of Speech and Drama in
1954. She first appeared in the West End theatre, playing opposite her
father, in 1958.

Redgrave continues
to work regularly in the theatre. In 2003 she won a Tony Award for "Best
Actress in a Play" for her performance in the Broadway revival
of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. In January 2006,
Redgrave was presented the Ibsen Centennial Award for her "outstanding
work in interpreting many of Henrik Ibsen's works over the last decades."[2]
Previous recipients of the award include Liv Ullmann, Glenda Jackson,
and Claire Bloom.

Redgrave will play
Joan Didion in Didion's upcoming New York stage adaptation of her recent
book, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Film career

Early film
career
Redgrave in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, 1966Highlights of Vanessa
Redgrave's early film career include her first starring role in Morgan:
A Suitable Case for Treatment (for which she earned an Oscar nomination,
a Cannes award, a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA Film Award); her
portrayal of the cool London swinger, Jane, in 1966’s Blowup;
her spirited portrayal of dancer Isadora Duncan in Isadora (for which
she won a National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress, along
with a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination in 1969); and various portrayals
of historical figures - ranging from Andromache in The Trojan Women,
to Mary of Scotland in Mary, Queen of Scots.

Julia
In 1977, Redgrave funded and narrated a documentary film "The Palestinian",
which focused on the plight of the Palestinian people. That same year
she starred in the film Julia, about a woman murdered by the Nazi regime
in the years prior to World War II for her anti-Fascist activism. Her
co-star in the film was Jane Fonda who, in her 2005 autobiography, noted
that "there is a quality about Vanessa that makes me feel as if
she resides in a netherworld of mystery that eludes the rest of us mortals.
Her voice seems to come from some deep place that knows all suffering
and all secrets. Watching her work is like seeing through layers of
glass, each layer painted in mythic watercolor iimages, layer after
layer, until it becomes dark - but even then you know you haven't come
to the bottom of it . . . The only other time I had experienced this
with an actor was with Marlon Brando . . . Like Vanessa, he always seemed
to be in another reality, working off some secret, magnetic, inner rhythm."

Redgrave's performance
in Julia garnered an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. However,
members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), led by Rabbi Meir Kahane,
chose to picket the awards ceremony in the spring of 1978 to protest
against both Redgrave and her support of the Palestinian cause.

Aware of the JDL's
presence outside, Redgrave, in her acceptance speech, denounced all
forms of totalitarianism, noting neither she nor the Academy (who had
received death threats if she won) would be intimidated by “a
small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature
to Jews all over the world.” Her statement was greeted by both
applause and boos from the audience.

Later in the broadcast,
veteran screenwriter and Oscar presenter Paddy Chayefsky announced to
the audience, “there's a little matter I'd like to tidy up…at
least if I expect to live with myself tomorrow morning. I would like
to say that I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards
for the propagation of their own personal propaganda. I would like to
suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a
pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple
‘Thank you' would have sufficed.” He received thunderous
applause.

In 1978 Rabbi Meir
Kahane published a book entitled Listen Vanessa, I am a Zionist, which
was later renamed Listen World, Listen Jew in direct response to Redgrave's
comments at the Academy Awards. To this day many right-wing Jewish groups,
such as the JDL, consider Redgrave a supporter of terrorism. The JDL
itself, however, has been described by the United States Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) in Congressional testimony as a “violent”
and “extremist” group. In a sidebar in its “Terrorism
2000/2001” report, the Bureau notes, “The Jewish Defense
League has been deemed a right-wing terrorist group.”[3]

In June 2005 Redgrave
was asked on Larry King Live: “Regardless of distinctions about
policy, do you support Israel's right to exist?” “Yes, I
do,” she replied.[4]

Later film career
Redgrave in Mrs Dalloway, 1997Later film roles of note include those
of suffragette Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians (1984, a fourth Best
Actress Academy Award nomination), transsexual Renee Richards in Second
Serve (1986); Mrs. Wilcox in Howards End (1992, her sixth Academy Award
nomination, this time in a supporting role); crime boss Max in Mission:
Impossible (1996, when discussing the role of Max, DePalma and Cruise
thought it would be fun to cast an actor like Redgrave, luckily they
decided to go with the real thing); Oscar Wilde’s mother in Wilde
(1997); Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway (1997); and Dr. Wick in Girl,
Interrupted (1999). Many of these roles and others, garnered various
accolades for Redgrave.

Her performance
as a lesbian grieving the loss of her longtime partner in the HBO series
If These Walls Could Talk 2 earned her a Golden Globe for “Best
TV Series Supporting Actress” in 2000. This same performance also
led to an “Excellence in Media Award” by the Gay & Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). The award honors “a member
of the entertainment community who has made a significant difference
in promoting equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered
people”.[5]

Political activism
Since the 1960s Redgrave has supported a range of human rights causes,
including opposition to the Vietnam War, nuclear disarmament, independence
for northern Ireland, freedom for Soviet Jews (she was awarded the Sakharov
medal by Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner, in 1993 for her efforts),
and aid for Bosnian Muslims and other victims of war. She serves as
a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and was a co-founding member of Artists
Against Racism.

Redgrave identifies
as a socialist, but her opposition to Soviet oppression led her, early
in her career, to join the anti-Stalinist Workers' Revolutionary Party
(UK) (WRP), on whose ticket she twice ran for Parliament. Redgrave's
Trotskyist political views have been a cause of controversy for some,
as has her membership in the WRP. She remained loyal to WRP founder
Gerry Healy when he was expelled from the WRP in the mid-1980s. She
and other Healy loyalists founded the short-lived Marxist Party in the
1990s. Since 2004 she has been a member of the Peace and Progress Party.

In 1980 Redgrave
made her first American TV debut as concentration-camp survivor Fania
Fénelon in the Arthur Miller-scripted TV movie Playing for Time
– a part for which she won an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress
in 1981. The decision to cast Redgrave as Fenelon was, however, a source
of controversy for some Jewish individuals and organizations. In light
of Redgrave's support for the Palestinian cause, even Fenelon objected
to her casting. Redgrave was perplexed by such hostility, stating in
her 1991 autobiography her long-held belief that "the struggle
against anti-Semitism and for the self-determination of the Palestinians
form a single whole." (p. 306)

and Akhmed ZakayevIn
December 2002 Redgrave paid £50,000 bail for Chechen separatist
Deputy Premier and special envoy Akhmed Zakayev, who had sought political
asylum in the United Kingdom and was accused by the Russian government
of aiding and abetting hostage-takings in the Moscow Hostage Crisis
of 2002--in which 128 hostages lost their lives due to Russian special
forces (OMON) action --and guerrilla warfare against Russia.

At a press conference
Redgrave said she feared for the life of Zakayev if he were to be extradited
to Russia on terrorism charges. He would "die of a heart attack"
or some other mysterious explanation which would be offered by Russia,
she said.[6] On 13 November 2003, a London court rejected the Russian
government's request for Zakayev's extradition. Instead, the court accepted
a plea by lawyers for Mr Zakayev that he would not get a fair trial
- and could even face torture - in Russia. "It would be unjust
and oppressive to return Mr Zakayev to Russia," Judge Timothy Workman
ruled.[7]

In 2004, Vanessa
Redgrave and her brother Corin Redgrave announced the launch of the
Peace and Progress Party which would campaign against the Iraq War and
for human rights.